Give The Theatre at Anne Arundel Community College credit for refusing to play it safe, for going out on a theatrical limb in its choice of productions.
Last spring’s Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, as complex and raucous as any musical you’ll see, was a case in point. The current Les Liaisons Dangereuses is another example of the theater’s propensity for asking itself, and its audiences, to stretch beyond their comfort zones.
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My original plan was to get a few big perch for a family fish fry on the weekend. I also hoped to capture smaller ones to live-line for rockfish later in the day at the Bay Bridge. It didn’t quite work out that way.
With a healthy supply of grass shrimp and some razor clams for the perch, I splashed my skiff and made the short run out to the river channel. Slowly cruising a pattern, I looked for the big school of perch I had successfully worked over the previous week....

Think again if you think shade trees pretty much care for themselves.
In the forest, where trees care for themselves, fewer than one percent of seedlings grow to become marketable trees.
What do you know about how the crotch angle, crossing branches and branch spacing affect tree health? Allowing narrow crotch angles on branches and stems to remain on young trees will result in premature tree damage. Rot is another common problem with narrow crotch angles...

As twilight gives way to darkness, look for Mars low in the south-southwest. At first magnitude, the red planet is no brighter than your average star, so scouring the horizon with binoculars may help you find it. Can you make out the teapot shape of Sagittarius below? Mars is just above the handle, while the spout points toward the now-set sun.
Jupiter rises in the east-southeast a little before midnight, and by 6am it is almost directly overhead. Early Friday morning it is...

Hiro Hamada (voiced by Ryan Potter: Supah Ninjas) is not a nerd. Sure, he graduated high school at 13, but he bypasses higher education for a more lucrative career in robot battles, where his apparently innocuous bot dismantles the fiercest opponent with ease. When Hiro’s hustle runs afoul of both bot-fighting thugs and the police, his older brother Tadashi (Daniel Henney: Revolution) decides enough is enough.
Tadashi forces his little brother to visit his college,...

The following is an account of my strange sighting. For what it’s worth, I swear on my life it is without exaggeration.
My friend Dave and I frequently park my car on the side of Arundel Beach Road and admire the view of the Magothy River while chatting and eating McDonalds. We are down at the location a few nights a week and have been for the past two years, Dave even longer. The early morning hours of August 5, 2014, showed us a sight I could not explain.
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In a 50-year tradition, the Christmas tree that shines throughout December on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol is cut in one of the nation’s states.
This year’s Capitol Christmas Tree, a whopping 88-foot white spruce, was cut in Minnesota’s Chippewa National Forest on Oct. 29. Followed by a caravan of caretakers, it will make more that 30 celebratory stops on its 2,000-mile truck journey to Washington, D.C. It is carried by a Kenworth Truck Company T880,...

Maizie, Pumpkin and Scarlet love pumpkins. They devour them like pigs because, well, they are pigs. Now they want your leftover ­Halloween Jack-o-lanterns.
Over 1.4 billion pounds of pumpkins are sold in the United States every year, 80 percent in October, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Many are displayed at Halloween and at Thanksgiving, then tossed in the garbage. That’s a lot of rotting pumpkins. Pumpkins don’t decompose well in landfills...

Multiply 400 cats — as they’ll do without any assistance — and in a year you’ll get 4,000 kittens, more or less.
“It can cascade,” says Kathy Evans of Rude Ranch’s Spay Spa and Neuter Nook.
Four thousand fewer unwanted kittens in 2015 sounded like a pretty good investment to Maryland Department of Agriculture’s Spay and Neuter Advisory Board. So good that the seven animal advocates on the new board voted to...

Gardeners don’t need degrees in botany. But knowing a little botany — plus a bit about the history of human relationships with plants — creates a deeper gardening experience. Just ask local author Ruth Kassinger.
Kassinger takes a warm and humorous approach to the green world in her book A Garden of Marvels: The Discovery that Flowers Have Sex, Leaves Eat Air, and Other Secrets of the Way Plants Work. From her own adventures growing citrus at our latitude...